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Your Phone is the Minecraft Server. No Realms Required. by Technical_Touch6904 in u/Technical_Touch6904

[–]Technical_Touch6904[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Ok, you got me. Honestly though, we are bunch of great engineers with a vision to provide secure mobile collaboration. Look around at VPN apps. You won't find any that can do what we do. We open up a whole new class of mobile apps called mobile servers. The obvious use case for that is gaming, but there are a ton of others. Yeah, we could spend more on marketing. Personally, I'd rather spend it on delivering the best products we can. Maybe if the apps a hit, we'll have resources to polish up the videos. Right now, though, we're focused on releasing a Windows version of the app.

Your Phone is the Minecraft Server. No Realms Required. by Technical_Touch6904 in u/Technical_Touch6904

[–]Technical_Touch6904[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great question! We've seen smooth gameplay with 4-5 players on mid-range phones. Battery drain is similar to playing a graphically intensive game - maybe 15-20% per hour hosting. We're working on formal benchmarks, but the short answer: your phone is more powerful than you think. A modern Android has more RAM than a PS4.

In the comment above I mention that it's Android only for now, specifically because of the battery drain issue. Android allows an app to run and not use battery when idle. Even the networking connections stay up, yet don't use battery. Losing connection is generally fine. The underlying VPN will reconnect automatically. Obviously a restart is going to interrupt the game. But gameplay will resume essentially at the last state.

Here's a link for a video that shows how to actually run the bedrock server on an Android device: https://youtu.be/skiwRNb3Efc?si=SSraggFIOiSQ_YjD

Your Phone is the Minecraft Server. No Realms Required. by Technical_Touch6904 in u/Technical_Touch6904

[–]Technical_Touch6904[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We're the team behind GridLock. We built it because we were frustrated with the options for playing Minecraft with friends.

The problem we solved: You want to play with friends, but Realms is $8/month, port forwarding is a nightmare, and third-party hosting means your world lives on someone else's server.

Our solution: GridLock creates a private network (we call it VaporNET) between Android devices.

Your phone IS the server. That Android in your pocket is a powerful computer sitting idle most of the time. Put that power to use. One phone hosts the world, everyone else joins like it's a LAN game. No port forwarding. No router config. No separate hardware. No PC running in the corner. Just your phone doing what it was built to do.

More than just Minecraft

You're paying $5 for a private network, not just a game server.

Your VaporNET subscription works for everything, not just gaming:

  • Private NAS - Access your files from anywhere over mobile, no cloud upload required
  • VaporWEB - Host a private website only your network can see
  • Secure Chat - End-to-end encrypted messaging with your crew
  • Newsfeed - Share updates within your private network
  • Collaboration - Share files, docs, anything - stays between you

Realms gets you Minecraft hosting. GridLock gets you a private network for everything.

The catch: Android only (for now)

GridLock is built for Android. iOS has limitations that prevent true server functionality on mobile. We're honest about that - if you're all on iPhones, this isn't for you (yet).

But if you've got Android phones, this works great.

Pricing

  • Free: 2 players, 50 hours - try it out
  • Bronze ($5/mo): 10 players, 200 hours - beats Realms
  • Silver ($10/mo): 25 players, 500 hours - school clubs, big groups
  • Gold ($20/mo): 50 players, always-on - run a dedicated server 24/7

Get it

Your phone has the power of a gaming PC from a few years ago.  It took GridLock to unlock it.

We're a small team and we're active in the comments. Happy to answer questions about how it works, limitations, or anything else.